Re:***** Serious Problem with Oracle 7.0.16 and Solaris 2.3

I regret I was unable to retrieve the exact text of the person who hinted that the Oracle 7.0.16 Readme File contained all of the patches you needed. Perhaps he or she was lucky enough to have a system administrator who maintained all of the Solaris patches up to date or the installation did not contain the mix of products or size of database that casued our error.

For reference, the README document on the 7.0.16 disk contains Oracle patch 184332, which I'm sure is helpful but does not contain the Oracle patch that I was speaking about (both are actually object sets to add to the libora.a file, but they are different, I diffed them). It is also not the patch CD that you receive to upgrade Oracle 7.0.16.4 to 7.0.16.6 (which is interesting in that they tell you to read the README file and when you look at it, it turns out to be a shell script with very little descriptive text, so you just execute it).

Let me be specific about the patches that Oracle tech support indicated that we needed. The Solaris patch is 101318-35 or higher (there were 4 other patches that we had to apply to support this patch, the Solaris patch installation utility is pretty good about keeping track of dependencies and forcing you to load all of the patches that you need). The Oracle patch was an object titled sm.o which was applied to libora.a. I have appended the text of their installation process below for reference.

I do not know why the other person did not have this problem, but I can say definitely that we did, we were not imagining it, but that I am very glad that these other folks did not have it (it's a pain in the...) Again, hope this helps some other poor soul avoid the problems we had. Now on to another 7.0.16 install and then the 7.1.3 upgrade on Sequent (sigh).

Patch for bug# 209743

The patch contains following files:  

README
sm.o  

This patch must be applied to 7.0.16.4 release of Oracle for Solaris 2.3. In addition, Sun Patch 101318-35 or higher must be applied to the system.

Note that either patch, the Oracle patch or the Sun patch, can be installed
without the other, and this will not result in any additional problems. However, to resolve the ISM/System-Panic problem, both patches need to be applied.  

Once this patch is applied, it should be possible to use ISM. Therefore, if you have set use_ism=false in your init.ora to avoid various problems, you may remove that line or change it to use_ism=true if you wish to use ISM.   Steps to apply patch:

1. Save your existing copy of libora.a

% cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib
% cp libora.a libora.aOLD
 

2. Archive the objects into libora.a  

% /usr/ccs/bin/ar cr $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libora.a sm.o
 

3. Shutdown all databases.  

4. Relink the oracle executable.  

% cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
% make -f oracle.mk install
 

April 12, 1994. Received on Tue Jul 19 1994 - 03:33:01 CEST